Untitled 1
by BrocktreeJustLeft
Summary: Natalya muses in the bathtub. Vignette


**_Vignette: a small, graceful literary sketch. Pronounced __vihn__**-**yet'  
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**I'm the hipster teen writer who has to use the term that's actually in the dictionary instead of the popular and well known "drabble." Can't claim this little derp as graceful, but it is words and it is short, so otherwise, it fits the description. I really hope this will be worth the few minutes you're using up to read it, I tried to make something that wasn't a waste of time.**

She hears the strangest things when her ears are underwater.

Fingernails dragging across the side of the tub, the boom of smacking her hand or foot or head on the bottom, the roar of the water's atoms in their eternal movement – those are the noises she prefers to hear.

_glirp glub bliff bloop_

When outside of the tub, the regular world is quite like her: dead silent, with the sporadic interruptions of shrieks and howls – voices talking to each other, to her, to themselves even. She doesn't really register what they say very often. The conversations start, fray out or clam up, or burn out and end, and for lack of originality, no one remembers them. The _how-are-you's, I'm-doing-such-and-such-would-you-care-to-join-me's, you're-doing-such-and-such-whether-you-like-it-or-not's_, and pointless gossiping pretty much sum all household conversation.

To be honest (and why not? She _is_ alone and thinking to herself), some of the shrieks and howls aren't as terrible as others. She _cares_ about some of them, and sops up some of the gossip (mostly things not related to or directed at her), saving it for a later how-are-you. No gossip has proven useful yet; she was never really an optimist – nothing _will _be useful.

_but i have a habit_

Like her, it's very cold inside the house. (It's very cold outside, too, but that's another story entirely.) Getting out of the bathtub is more torturous than actual torture (and she, of all people, knows torture). The water itself has usually become ice cold by the time she gets out (or room temperature, depending on your temperament), and no amount of fluffy towel could ever remedy that. Considering this, her ritual for getting out the bathtub is pretty masochistic: after draining it, she slowly stands in the tub (won't do to get the rug all wet), grabs her towel, dries herself with it, drops the towel on the floor beside the tub (her feet are hard to dry in the tub), then runs over it to her clothes on the counter. Her fingers and toes don't warm up for hours after that; she wears gloves. Everyone stalks around the house like country-folk in a preindustrial cabin, wearing layers upon layers of clothes and weighing their beds down with whatever heavy blankets they can scrounge together (sometimes not very much).

That insufferable _man_ never acts cold. Surely he is only covering it up with smiles and lies, secret undershirts, and his incessant vigor in cleaning things. Perhaps he is dying, and wishes to appear as strong and flawless as possible before the end. It would explain how cordially he treats her (_utterly_).

_get out of my head, please_

He comes to mind when she's not obsessing over other things (rarely), lingers far past his welcome, only leaving when she has some demanding task to concentrate on. All the nice, sugar coated words that shouldn't stick longer than old tape come to mind – every how-are-you, how-are-your-classes-going, will-you-still-not-let-me-clean-your-room, and I-hope-you're-doing-well. She can't really escape them in the tub, there's nowhere to go, nothing to look at and get distracted by in here (all her sore muscles have been prodded at and mused over, every knot and tangle in her hair picked apart); the cracked and wildly patterned ceiling makes a good backdrop to zone off to, also.

Heretic thoughts drift through her like air; she breathes in a notion of accepting the next dinner invitation he offers (would he still be so polite when they were alone together? Could she maintain a conversation through a whole meal?), then breathes it out (probably not, and no)

_i don't even like you_

(He's very sweet and gentle.)

(She's very bitter and harsh.)

_you sentimental fool_

It's as cold as her here, and she's the only one who really belongs with the ice outside.

She thinks of herself at times, wondering if she really is some sort of frozen entity, doomed to eternal apathy. Normal people have friends. Snow queens have statues to talk at and scribble identities onto.

_this one likes to cook, that one likes boys, the other one sings me to sleep at night_

She hears the strangest things when her ears are underwater.

**A few more words (yes, I'm back): You're more than welcome to critique. No pressure, just opportunity. (Of course, any review is welcome.)  
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**Really sorry if my headcanon characterization is way wrong and offensively bad. As if LitBel needed more of these sorts of stories! My original contribution to this ship was going to be a much less poetic, Hughes-ian adventure in which Lithuania and Poland kidnap Belarus for a day and go on a strangely nonviolent car ride around the world - psychedelic. Anyway, this was sort of a practice in static characters and in pieces that aren't unfolding in my head, crazy awesome inspired. This was supposed to come out over a thousand words (the story itself is 690 words, my rambling just bumps it way up on here), but it ended before that, and I just couldn't see anywhere to put in more. It looked a lot less spacious in OpenOffice... **

**Thank you, faithful reader, who takes a chance on short stuff! **


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